Trump and the Truth: A President Tests His Own Credibility

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President Trump with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada in the Oval Office last year. Mr. Trump said this past week that he had made up information during a conversation with Mr. Trudeau.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When President Trump told donors at a fund-raiser this past week that he had invented a fact during a conversation with Canada’s prime minister, the surprise was not that America’s leader makes things up, but that he openly admitted it.

Or maybe admitted is the wrong word. He actually seemed to boast about it.

In the furor that followed the disclosure of his remarks, attention focused on the impact on relations with Canada and whether the president was right or wrong in his assertion about trade. But the episode goes to the heart of a more fundamental debate about Mr. Trump: When does he know the things he says are false, and when is he simply misinformed?

Mr. Trump, after all, has made so many claims that stretch the bounds of accuracy that full-time fact-checkers struggle to keep up. Most Americans long ago concluded that he is dishonest, according to polls. While most presidents lie at times, Mr. Trump’s speeches and Twitter posts are embedded with so many false, distorted, misleading or unsubstantiated claims that he has tested even the normally low standards of American politics.

“His statement this week was another reminder of how cavalier he is with the truth,” said Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan fact-checking website owned by the Poynter Institute. “He seems so willing to say whatever suits him at that moment regardless of whether it’s true. In all the time that I was editor of PolitiFact and in the time since when I’ve worked with fact-checkers all over the world, I’ve just never seen any political figure distort the truth so recklessly.”

Mr. Trump’s presidency has been marked from the start with false or misleading statements, such as his outlandish claims that more people came to his inauguration than any before and that at least three million unauthorized immigrants voted illegally against him, costing him the popular vote. He has gone on to assert that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, a claim that his own Justice Department refuted, and that he would not benefit from his tax-cutting plan.

The lack of fidelity to facts has real-world consequences in both foreign affairs and domestic policymaking. Foreign diplomats and lawmakers of both parties say they do not assume anything he says is necessarily true. In a White House where one aide described the existence of “alternative facts” and another acknowledged telling “white lies,” staff members scramble to defend his claims without putting their own credibility on the line. News organizations debate when to use the word “lie” because it implies intent.

Since Mr. Trump became a presidential candidate, PolitiFact has evaluated more than 500 assertions and found 69 percent of them mostly false, false or “pants on fire” false. By comparison, it judged 26 percent of the statements by Mr. Obama that it evaluated as false and the same percentage for those by Hillary Clinton.

These are not scientific measurements, of course, because the selection of statements for examination is inherently subjective and focused on those that seem questionable, rather than a gauge of all public comments. Mr. Trump’s defenders say fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact are politically biased, which Mr. Adair and his counterparts adamantly deny. But even among Republicans examined by PolitiFact, Mr. Trump is an outlier.

While PolitiFact did not exist during most of President George W. Bush’s tenure, it has found that 42 percent of statements that it examined by Senator John McCain of Arizona and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the two previous Republican presidential nominees, were false. The party’s congressional leaders, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, judged on far fewer statements, were both at similar levels, 43 percent and 41 percent.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Mr. Trump’s supporters rarely defend him as a truth teller, but argue that all presidents lie and point to false statements made by his predecessors, like Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky), Mr. Bush (Iraq) and Mr. Obama (health care).

Advisers say privately that Mr. Trump may not always be precise but is speaking a larger truth that many Americans understand. Flyspecking, tut-tutting critics in the news media, they say, fail to grasp the connection he has with a section of the country that feels profoundly misled by a self-serving establishment. To them, the particular facts do not matter as much as this deeper truth.

“I think presidents, all of them, actually have a habit of thinking that they’re right, whether they’re right or not,” said Patrick H. Caddell, a political consultant who shared research with Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “He’s more guilty of that than some sort of preplanned and mendacious statements.”

But Mr. Caddell, a strategist for Jimmy Carter when he was beaten up by the media as naïve for promising never to tell a lie, said Americans see Mr. Trump in context. “In Washington, D.C., facts don’t matter; people have narratives, including the media, and they just ignore anything that doesn’t fit that,” he said. “Why should the American people punish him when they think the entire political culture” is that way?

Mr. Trump’s reported conversation with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada occurred during a St. Louis fund-raiser on Wednesday for Josh Hawley, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri. Reporters were not permitted in the room, but an audio recording was later obtained by The Washington Post.

As Mr. Trump told the story, the Canadian leader assured him that the United States did not have a trade deficit with Canada.

“I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do,’” Mr. Trump said, according to a transcript published by The Post. “I didn’t even know. Josh, I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’”

The president also asserted that Japan bars American cars from its market through an odd test. “They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car,” he said. “And if the hood dents, then the car doesn’t qualify.”

At a briefing the next day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, acknowledged that the bowling ball anecdote was false. “Obviously, he’s joking about this particular test,” she said, “but it illustrates the creative ways some countries are able to keep American goods out of their markets.”

And even though the United States trade representative’s office says the United States had a $12.5 billion trade surplus with Canada in 2016, she asserted that Mr. Trump was actually right because he was including items not included by the government agency. “Once you include those, it shows that there actually is a deficit,” she said. She later said on Twitter that the president was referring only to trade in goods, not trade in both goods and services, the common measurement.

But the point was that Mr. Trump acknowledged to the donors that he made the claim having no idea whether it was right or wrong. And it was not even the only time that day he made false statements.

In a public conversation at a Boeing factory in St. Louis, he lauded the number of jobs created on his watch and said “nobody would have believed that could have happened.” But in fact, 2.5 million new jobs were created in his first 13 months as president, almost exactly the same as the 2.6 million created in the 13 months before he became president and Mr. Obama was in the White House.

As a businessman, Mr. Trump often fabricated or exaggerated to sell a narrative or advance his interests. In his memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” he called it “truthful hyperbole” or “innocent exaggeration.”

When trying to lure investors to a casino project, he had bulldozers dig on one side of the site and dump the dirt on the other to give the impression that the project was making progress. He would call reporters and pretend to be a publicity agent for himself named John Barron or John Miller. He claimed to earn $1 million from a speech when it was $400,000. He claimed to be worth $3.5 billion when seeking a bank loan, four times what the bank eventually found.

“He’s a salesman and that’s not about telling the truth, that’s not the DNA about being a salesman,” said Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President,” a biography of his family. “The DNA of being a salesman is telling people what they want to hear. And he’s got it.”

Jack O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, recalled Mr. Trump telling New Jersey authorities that he had secured bank financing for a new casino and would not use junk bonds, only to turn around and then use junk bonds.

“In my experience with him, there are times when he just compulsively lies and there are times when he strategically lies,” said Mr. O’Donnell, who wrote a scathing book about Mr. Trump. “In both regards, after he says something, I do think he believes that whatever he says becomes his reality. That’s my experience with him. It doesn’t have to be anything big but it certainly can be.”

Mr. Trump continued his practice as president. The Washington Post’s fact-checker documented 2,140 false or misleading claims in Mr. Trump’s first year in office, a rate of nearly six a day, many of them repeated even after he was corrected.

A Quinnipiac University poll in January showed that only 35 percent of Americans consider him honest, while 60 percent do not. In their first terms, more than 50 percent considered Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama honest, although those numbers fell for both by their second terms.

Republicans as well as Democrats express concern. Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, has a new book coming out in May called “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us.” On the cover is an illustration of Mr. Trump with a Pinocchio nose.

Her explanation is that Mr. Trump’s supporters do not see deception, they see a commitment to winning. “Donald Trump’s lies and fabrications don’t horrify America,” says the publisher’s summary of her book. “They enthrall us.”